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The Contemplated Secession from THE 
FEDHHAL HEPUBLIC of North Amer- 
ica, by the Souliiern States. 

Thr following inter from an IrUh-Amcrlcan Citizen is re- 
npecirull) addre»<i<-a to ihc (illzcUH ol SOLTII CAROLINA par- 
tli'Ulurl}'. 

Detroit, December 9, 1860. 

South Carounaxs: 

Wliat is the matter with you, that, like 
a weak-inin<UMl, aiscoiiteiited, hysterical woman, so many of 
your people are insanely crying out for a Bill of Divorce from 
your solemn federateil comi>act with these United States? 

Have you any comitlaints to make against the conduct of your 
sister States? Who has harmed you? Where is your bill of 
charges? You seem to be precijtitate without necessity — nay, 
with a rashness jtositively blamable ! 

This great confederacy, to found which your fathers con 
tributed "their lives, iheir fortunes, and their sacred honor," 
was not intended to explode on every or any occasion of 
alleged grievance entertained by any of the contracting par- 
ties ! Is it possil)le, tliat with age and experience as a sove- 
reign, independent State of the Union, you are not maturing 
in collective good sense and prudence ? Have you been care- 
ful to select your representatives to the Federal Congiess for 
their enlarge.! acciuirements, good, practical, common sense, 
aud gcucral uxpcricnco aud knowledge of your State,— of the 



2 '^^^^ 

whole country— of the world at large ;— with tempers firm 
hut meek ; with a capacity to forbear without a deroo^ation of 
honor ? There should be no State or personal selfishness in 
Congress, and harmony being the strength of all institutions, 
the halls of an American Republican Congress should be the 
most decorous and dignified of any legislative national body in 
the world. In fiict, we should exhibit a liigh moralizing exam- 
ple to all the world; the high /nd ennobling example of col- 
lective, popular representative self-government. There is no 
necessity for intemperance, or passionate outbursts, or threat- 
ening indications of smcidal separati(Ai from your friends, your 
co-laborers in the work of the amelioration of universal man- 
kind. The mighty civilizing power and infiuence of the United 
States are only beginning to be felt and acknowledged abroad 
among the powerful nations of the Old World. You do not 
seriously intend to separate yourselves as a State from the 
manifest destiny of the great American Republican Confede- 
racy. Mark how the great moral influence of the Federal Na- 
tion has obtained universally conceded respect for the Ameri- 
can flag, and the representatives of our executive Federal Gov- 
ernment in every country throughout the world. Are you not 
proud in enjoying this high position of honor in common with 
your sister States ? How contemptible would be the influence 
abroad, as well as at home, of each particular State in its un- 
confederated isolation ! How little would be thought abroad 
of even the great mercantile and manufacturing State of New 
York, but for its federated alUance ! The States unprotected 
by federated aUiance, and consequent consolidated resources for 
mutual and general defense, would soon fall a i)rey to internal 
supineness and demoralization, were there no outside foreign 
enemies to be apprehensive of. It is the policy, and the para- 
mount duty of all the States bounded by the Gulf to the Strait 
of Panama by the shores of the Pacific to the Arctic regions, 
which would necessarily include Canada, without meaning to 
leave the sentinel Island of Cuba out, to be in one grand indis- 
tructible and perpetual confederacy for the general honor, good, 
wealth, and security of all? The United States, as now con- 
stituted, do not form a cumbrous and imwieldly Republican 
Empire. The duties and responsibilities of the Federal Con- 
gress and the National Executive generally are simple and tan- 
gible enough, under the experienced superintendency ftnd man- 



ageiuent of the pieveral (.leiiartments whose officei"s are selected 
for their integrity and ability. Your own State government, 
like all the others which constitute the Confederacy, is inde- 
|»erident and sovereign of the Federal Congress in all affairs of 
State legislation, the boundaries over which your State execu- 
tive and legislative action and power must prevail, are as well 
detiiK'd to-day, and all the details, so far as your State legisla- 
tion is to be considertfd, as perfectly untrammelled by the Fed- 
eral Government, or by any interpolation of any other sister 
State, as they would be did you madly rush into permitted 
revolution, or jjassively granted secession. Where, then, 
oouhl you be a gainer, while you would, assuredly, in funda- 
mental respects be an incalculable loser ? The same argument 
applies with nearly eipial force to any patched up confederacy 
you might succeed to organise out of the few other States of 
kindred sympathy with yours. Jointly, with all of the other 
Slates, both the older and the younger confederates, you, and 
all, severally and collectively, owe your dignity — your advanced 
♦levelopuieut, and increasing power, honor, wealth, peace, and 
prosperity to your Union. Ah! how true it is that Union is 
stretK/th ! That Union is beauty I " Uxited we staxd, — di- 
VIDEU \\K kai.l!" 

SoLTH CvKoM.VAXsI The evil intelligence is busy with our 
otherwise great and glorious and happy Republic! Do YOU 
not be an instrument in the hands of the monster of evil desti- 
ny. Vour people, of course, are all intellectual, and a little 
retleetion will produce a great change in a short time. If you 
were a little more suspicious of outside — foreign — influences, 
probably the better. The brave are rarely suspicious. You 
are historically brave and honorable, high mettled, and quick 
of resentment; but these are tempers whether in an individual 
or in collective community that require a just restraint, and an 
intelligent subjugation to the sober and infallible standard of 
calculating reason. There may be no data for supjjosing that 
intri<4ueing foreigners are insiduously employing malevolent 
and ileep laid plots against our general peace and national con- 
solidation, but my suspicions tend in that direction — it would 
be but historically natural. "Divide and Conquer !" has been a 
motto of some European powers, in their stratagetic attempts 
to tlismeinber and ultimately vanquish peoples upon whom the 
greed v eye of conquest had set his vulture gaze. My own es- 



tablished opinion is, that not one of the so called enlightened, 
civilized and established powers of Europe desire to see longer 
perpetuated the great annually increasing glory and enlarging 
influence of this mighty Republic. Why should they ? They 
believe (we will generally find people readily believing almost 
all things tending to the promotion of their own interests and 
aggrandizement) that the monarchies, and aristocracies, and oli- 
garchic forms of government they enjoy so amazingly by heredi- 
tary, and, as they insist, of Divine Right, are the best conditions 
of government for the people respectively. With the indepen- 
dent intelligence of the masses of our people, how long could 
such form of government last here in our States, either feder- 
ally or separately ? In a word, no such design need be practic- 
ally attempted. But then the establishment of monarchy in 
the States of this Republic, wonld not be the object of Euro- 
pean monarch s. Their concern would be rather to accomplish 
the very thing you are threatening to do — to dismember — to 
dismember — to demoralize the Republic, not caring if the several 
components were hurled to Hades^ provided the ever increas- 
ing example of our superior economy, intelligeuce, and genera! 
success as a united family of democratic commonwealths were 
annihilated from staring their discontented peoples in the face 
as a reproof to their supineness, in slavishly lying in shackles, 
from which, by the employment of gigantic standing armies, 
and a multitudinous and otherwise xmnecessary gendarme 
and police^ the aforesaid enslaved j^eoplcs are not permitted to 
free themselves. Here and there, indeed every where in Eu- 
rope, are millions of fine men, women and children, whose na- 
tures might be ennobled to the highest emprise of man — culti- 
vated self-government, — and to whom we in this happy America 
are exhibiting a dangerous example — Such an example as make 
these royal tyrants tremble, and which would move them to 
confederate to shed showers of their ill-gotten gold, wrung 
from the hard labor of their subjects, to assist in the destruc- 
tion of the Republic of the United States. The agents of these 
royal interleagued tyrants are every where, and their objects are 
impenetrable, frequently »//?r?.^r the rpiise of husiness men in our 
midst. 

My Dear Friends — to return to alleged causes of discon- 
tent in your State, with your federal relation to that Union, 
pei-mit me to say, that nil reasonable men here, away in the 



North and Xoi'th-western States, have made up their minds that if 
any such causes are found justly existing, tliey must imperatively 
be removed under Mr. Lincoln's administration. Xotwith- 
standing his not owning slave property, he is too rational, too 
honest and respectable a citizen, and his private life and highly 
respectable personal character would alone be a guarantee for 
this assurance, that his Government shall be (conducted on 
terms of stern justice to all. What has he or his administra- 
tion to do with your slaves? Nothing! You have your own 
State prerogative k^gislation and supreme control, with which 
Congress nor the President dare constitutionally meddle. 
It would seem to rae, as a wellwisher, (but I may be wrong,) 
that for the number of slaves and their productiveness, there 
seems to be enough of slave territory, already occupied. 
But the exigencies of the demands for tropical products would 
decide that matter in the proper place. My own impression is, 
that the tide of free white labor will, before long, tend towards 
the South, ami all other interests give way to the enterprise of 
the white man's industry. I am also impressed with another 
opinion, that the manufacture of cotton fabrics, of every va- 
riety, as well as woolen cloths, will be carried on very exten- 
sively at no very distant day, not only in the Xorthern but also 
in the Southern States ; and that your markets for cotton in 
P^ngland will l)e, to a great extent, transferred to home manu- 
facturers. In this respect, both you of the South and we of the 
North, will be mutually the gainers, for the currency employed 
instead of again (as now) leaving our shores by a circuitous 
route to Europe, will always lie in our own country, actively 
employed from hand to hand in the multiform enterprises of 
busy American industry. 

Our specie has been annually drifting off in a rapidly con- 
suni[)tive depletion of our means to keep our people employed, 
while the exchequers of Euroj)ean nations, with all their wars 
and general extravagance, have been glutted with our Ameri- 
can gold and silver. ^V great nuuiy forms of argument might 
be presented to prove this great truth, that all — whether North 
or Soutli — should be alike convinced of, and feel alike interested 
in counteracting for ever: A State that depends upon furnish- 
ing raw material to be manufactured abroad, must ever, under 
such policy, be a poor State, and sink, in spite of its best en 
deavors, into degradation, nnd want of confidence among its 
ijuinmercial convsixuxlenU. 



The armies of England, to be employed, will be made instru- 
mental by its government to subjngate new cotton producing 
colonies, notwithstanding the sympathy at 2^^'Gse7it of the Eng- 
lish mill owners with the Southern American planters. The 
armies of France must be employed somewhere, and at some 
alfiir or another, or they will revolutionize the empire at home, 
and the wily man who is Emperor will stratagise expedients 
to make his plans popular, and utilitarian with the mercantile 
and manufacturing interests of his country. So that American 
States now in confederacy happily, and, it is to be hoped, irre- 
fragably should well understand their common interests, as well 
as the other grounds of political affiliation and permanent iden- 
tification of interest and destiny in union". Africa will probably 
be opened np in a short time before the arms of France and 
England united, and after subjugating the millions of wretched 
negroes there upon their own native soil to the arbitrary de- 
mands of their conquerers to labor, — those hordes of blacks 
will be both humanized as with you now — and be converted 
into industrious producers of cotton and other tropical ]iroducts 
for the supply of the markets of Europe, and probalily of 
America, — and these results would essentially lessen the ])rice 
of your Southern staples in European markets. 

All intelligent nations are giving present attention to ivfAN- 
UFACTURiNG — Still the field of want admittedly enlarges as so. 
cial intelligence increases, and humanity is elevated. It seems 
to me that it is much more than it ever was your interest to 
firmly rivet your alliance with your sister States. The manu- 
facture of both woolen and cotton fabrics must be undertaken 
on an unrestricted scale, at no distant day, in these United 
States, where probably 45,000,000 Americans will present 
a lively market. I am in fivor of " a Revolution'''' of this de- 
scription as quickly as possible in its accomplishment, but 
wholly opposed to South Carolina putting on her bonnet and 
shaAvl and bidding us all " good bye," without even the cere- 
mony of telling us her grievances in detail, with a view to their 
speedy and radical redress and removal. Much of the manufac- 
turing skill as well as capital of Europe — and of England particu- 
larly, will fiow into our United States on an American jirotective 
tariff being enacted by the Federal Congress, and it would be 
suicidal to the best interests of our country not to have vour 
own votes cast in favor of the meas\n-e. 



Here you observe if< another kind of guarantee tliat Mr. 
Lincoln and tlie Republican Party, now admittedly a great 
national fact, which defection from the Democracy has accomp- 
lished — are not abolitionists, but only avowedly opposed to the 
further wild extention of Slavery, over new and plainly illy- 
adapted territory — and even in these views the Republican 
Party is subject to modifications arising from the convictions 
of experience, as well as from outside pressure, while the 
President himself in the exercise of his power will be at a dead lock 
and can do little more than discharge an ordinary official in- 
fluence. No party at the north to my certain knowledge ever 
desired to meddle with your slaves, or to be so impertinent and 
pragmntical as even to think of giving you any advice until I 
personally ventured to write you my views in this two hours' 
letter ; keep them fat and sleek, and in comfortable health, as 
long as your ap])reciation of their labor is i-ecognized by 
your own laws, and if you want more tropical territory, why 
there is Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico. Personally I am a uni- 
versal Fillibustero, no matter what part of the world the true 
work of extending the blessing of repuljlican liljcrty and civil- 
ization, there would my influences be found, sustaining the cause 
of the oppressed. But South Carolixaxs, I am almost ashamed 
of you ! You, so chivalric — one of the old colonial peoples, with 
a now old history of republican associations, and an avowed 
admiration of our confederacy, to chafe your tempers into ir- 
rasibility, because the majority saw fit to place a plain, candid, 
honest, political opponent in the chair of the president, where 
if he had the personal desire, he dare not transgress that com- 
prehensive Constitution, binding the States in federal compact. 
He will make you an excellent President, and is evidently in 
many respects better suited to incur the responsibilities of the 
position than his excellent, but vanquished competitor. 

Turn your attention to sending men of enlarged and exten- 
sive experiences, with known characters for integrity, prudence 
and moderation to Congress, and all will be well. To address 
you has been, of course, a great liberty on my part, as a 
stranger, but feeling, were we more intimately acquainted, we 
should wish each other, as our common country well, I waived 
hesitation, and now respectfully wish you, for awhlile, farewell. 

JAMES DALE JOHNSTON. 



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